INDIANAPOLIS  Many Indiana residents will do something this weekend they haven't done in decades: change their clocks.

Hoosiers get uniformity at last
as daylight saving
spreads statewide.

USA TODAY

More than 30 years after most of Indiana decided that it would stay on Eastern Standard Time year round, all Hoosier clocks will follow most of the rest of the nation and spring forward one hour for daylight-saving time.

That will leave Arizona and Hawaii as the only states that do not observe daylight-saving time.

The vast majority of Indiana's 92 counties will switch to Eastern Daylight Time, while a handful of communities in northwest and southwest Indiana will operate on Central Daylight Time.

The historic clock change — an annual ritual elsewhere that officially comes at 2 a.m. the first Sunday in April — has evoked images in Indiana of Y2K revisited: Businesses are prepping for possible computer glitches; TV schedules are being tweaked; T-ball leagues are expanding because of the added evening daylight. Even the start time of the sacred Indianapolis 500 auto race has been pushed back this year (from noon to 1 p.m.) to accommodate the daylight change.

Indiana towns bordering other states, meanwhile, are celebrating the end of a haze of confusion.

"With the new setup, we're a happy people," said Pete Olson, city manager for Union City, Ind., a community on the Ohio border that for years has observed both Eastern Standard and Daylight times.

Until this weekend, 10 western counties observed Central Standard Time in the winter and Central Daylight in the summer; five in the southeast observed Eastern Standard in winter and Eastern Daylight in summer; and the other 77 counties were on Eastern Standard but never observed daylight saving.

But that arrangement, most of which was adopted in 1971 as a compromise between Hoosiers who wanted to be in the Central Time Zone and those who wanted to be in the Eastern Time Zone, has stirred controversy.

Prodded by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and business leaders, who said the change would help end confusion that has hurt economic growth, the General Assembly approved the new scheme last year after bitter debate.